Thursday, June 06, 2013

Boo-Freaking-Hoo

What angers me most is that the idea of bailing out any industry, let alone the cronyistic, nepotistic cesspool of the East Coast/London publishing house industry, is even palatable to society. Society is so ignorant and so clueless about basic economics they'll damn well eat up the "ooooo, we need to save the libraries" and vote to tax themselves more to support this veritable horse and buggy industry.Hat tip.

8 comments:

I think people can only be visionary world-changers for so long (not that I consider Patterson to be either one).

Adapt, or die.

But I think this has more to do with the privileged gate-keeper position that publishing houses and editors occupy. The internet made it possible for every one to finally, truly have a voice, and the Gatekeepers do not like what we have to say, one bit.

take your drm infested rent only what you are allowed to device day. arm, they guys whos cpus are in your kindle and most portible devices these days in going to bake drm into the gpus at hollywood's behest. it's only a matter of time they'll bake in to the cpu so other data can be locked down. not just "their" data but your data too.

try and imagine a world where we don't own any data. that's the world we're headed toward. the future is grim for general purpose computing.

If you're using a kindle or nook that's locked down to only their content then you should be ashamed to call yourself a man. I have dozens of gadgets from nooks to iPad minis to android tablets and iPhones. None of them are locked down. My nook has a custom android ROM and has the kindle app installed on it (my preferred reader). All of the iPhones and iPads in the family are all jail broken so we can download music and TV shows without using iTunes. Nobody tells me what I'm allowed to do with my devices. Nobody tells me when and how I can enjoy my music and shows. The old media is a dinosaur. Let it finish petrifying in the hole it dug for itself.

Of course I don't support any Government subsidies for the publishing industry, although I am in favor of public libraries. If I had a choice I'd eliminate public universities and keep public libraries.

That said, I also prefer traditional books over e books for two reasons:

You can flip through a book before you buy it, to see if you really want it or not. Self published e books are often pretty bad, and there is no way to tell before buying. Book reviews are usually worthless, in my experience.

Many e books need editing and formatting. A good editor is nearly a partner with the author in producing a book.

One other thing about real books; it leaves a permanent record out there for things. If Big Brother wanted to pull away, say, the book Worthless, electronically they would have to do very little. Not so with hardcopy books. Having that hard text out there also leaves the politicians with a permanent record of their idiocy. We can physically hide them, or copy to spread around if we need to.

The UK still puts their laws in velum-leafed books for just such a reason.